Animate Weapon

yeah. decided to get this skill a shot.
Started a summoner witch. incorporating animate weapon in with zombies and skels.
fresh char, new to the league. so no level 1 6l, uniques or other nonsense.

As an introduction 1-20 skill. Animate weapon is utterly terrible.
Socketed alone. it is completely useless.
Damage is poor. Hp is really poor. Even white weapons just do not drop frequently enough to justify bothering with it.
Summons in general at this point are weak. No melee splash, multistrike. and die instantly to any boss damage.
I tried to drop 10 rares on the ground for merviel fight. sent in the 4 zombies, 6 skels. And then the 10 2hander rares.

20-40.
The +45% duration passives are way down below Scion, near duelist. And since all the other minion nodes are up in templar/witch/scion/shadow territory, It almost relegates this skill to be Scion exclusive. Anyone else would be forced to place a ton of passive points to attain those 3 nodes, for what is hardly a useful skill in the first place.
Minion life nodes, and supports are now options.

40+ item quantity mods for more drops. duration support. standard auras, etc. 3-4 linked. maybe ok.
The only thing it does other summon skills don't would be the stack weapons on a boss and let them go, idea. Manual wall of blades. ha.


Short range for casting is definitely an issue.

Life: The animated weapon is so squishy it can easily be taken down in two hits, even with some minion +life nodes.

Duration: If the weapon somehow lasts long enough to make it past a single encounter, it disappears anyway! Since this can be abused if made permanent, I tolerate the duration. There are various ways to change this. Limit the number of weapons you can animate, reserve enough mana to do the former in a different way, add some +time increase to the already present minion nodes, etc.

AI: It's suicidal, which I suppose makes sense for a mindless weapon. It's not practical at all though. The weapon will charge ahead and kill itself in seconds.

Tedious: It requires an identified weapon to be laying on the ground. I have to spend Scrolls of Wisdom just to use a skill! Not only that, but the range is severely limited. I have to walk right up to the item. So annoying! I'd like to see the range increased substantially and the ability to cast on unidentified weapons. Perhaps it could treat it as a white item when used that way.

Level: I can't even animate any weapon on the ground. Only weapons that the gem supports. The dex requirement makes this even more difficult for a witch.

This is the most annoying and pointless skill gem in the game. I waste inventory space and Scrolls of Wisdom for thirty seconds of watching all of the animated weapons get destroyed. That said, it has the potential for fun, so I'm keeping it in the stash until it's worked out.

mana reservation sounds like a great way to make this skill useful and fun.

remove the duration, and probably the consuming of the weapon.

If mana reserved can be based on weapon ilevel it would be best.
So massive army of low level weapons or 2-3 of high level would create some amusing dynamics.

I was hoping this skill would animate my own weapon when I first glanced over it. It seems of much more use if it were to either use my own weapon and summon a copy, or just summon a random weapon with set stats (per level of the gem + links, I guess) for x duration with y life.

Am I correct in assuming that AW and AG are the exact same spells, with the parameters for their usage changed? Also is it correct to assume that the animated guardians and weapons borrow heavily from the character's own stats? That these are summoner-type skills that are not meant to be improved through summoner-specific nodes, but through the character's stats?

That would explain to me why the people playing dedicated summoners are complaining about how useless these skills are. A summoner with barely any life nodes, no strength, no accuracy, and no melee damage aren't going to find these skills very useful. I'm playing a spectral throw Scion who's only other actives are the two animate spells, and they're both quite useful. I like idea of taking the trash items the game throws at you and throwing them back at trash mobs. It's also a cool 'rolling thunder' mechanic where the build picks up momentum as it's killing speed increases depending on how many items you can keep activated.

I'd really like to see the utility of this skill expanded and improved a bit, allowing gloves (unarmed) and ranged weapons (even if they have to go up to point-blank range to do damage) to become animated weapons and increasing the spells range so that you don't have to click exactly on an item to animate it. It can be frustrating to try to click on a pile of items with one weapon and get no result because your cursor wasn't on the specific pixels the item's name was occupying.

"

FatesDefiler wrote:

I'm playing a spectral throw Scion who's only other actives are the two animate spells, and they're both quite useful.

Feedback is unclear.

Your passive tree?
Your level?
Level of gem?
iLevel of items?
Mods on items?
Level of testing area?
Monsters you tested?

And actual time of duel mob vs. your weapon in seconds?

I've only started playing again recently, last i played was early open beta so i do not quite understand all the possibilities with this skill as of yet, and it still may have some cool triggers with support gems, but i tried using it and as a single unsupported skill it really isn't very useful.

Firstly to stop and scour the ground for weapons is not something one wants to do when playing a fast paced game like this. There may be a few things you guys can do to help with this issue: first thing is to make it so that if you have that skill equipped then all white weapons on the ground become highlighted in some way so that you can easily spot one to summon, the other thing you guys could do is make it a radius spell, so for example as you activate your skill all white weapons in a certain radius will become summons.

Another option was to instead of summoning the weapons as creatures is to rather have them spin around your body as some sort of offensive barrier, which could work well with the Increased Area of Effect and faster attacks support gems or if you are a squishy ranged class you could add the Chance to Flee gem to this to keep monsters away from you. While it spins around your body doing damage you can keep adding more weapons to it to accumulate more damage. Eventually you could just have this massive steel whirlwind around you doing massive amounts of damage and perhaps after a certain amount of time the weapon will disappear (hopefully longer than 30 seconds).

"

Kaskar wrote:

Feedback is unclear.

skilltree:
Lvl. 29, gem has been leveling with me since beginning, gear is decent for a solo self-found player. Some glitch is preventing me from seeing this character's inventory from the website so I can't list specifics. I have Animated Weapon unmodded and Animated Guardian with added cold damage. It's my first character in the Domination league so I don't have anything except what I've gotten on this play-through.

I'm leveling another character, a Templar, mostly to get some added support gems for the Scion. He's using raise zombie and although I don't have a list of specific areas and numbers tested, playing the character through normal raise zombie isn't any more useful than Animate Weapon is.

I prefer Animate Weapon over Raise Zombie. They both live about the same amount of time, but I don't have to think about using AW whereas I'm always checking to make sure I've got max zombies. I like that they acquire targets and stick to them rather than running around like idiots every time I move my cursor across the screen and they can feel effective without having to invest a single passive point specifically into them. I'll probably sit them in a 4'link with AG, FA, and some other damage modifier. Sorry if I can't be more specific, I was just giving my more general impressions having used this skill while going through for the first time after being away for awhile.

Around level 64 I decided to stop using Animate Weapon + Animate Guardian - and switched in Raise Spectre with a 4L (After getting a GMP)

Even when linked with Minion Life and Added Fire Damage - and just about every Minion passive there is - the health of each Animated Weapon seems far too low against Merciless mobs - and the damage seems to be only slightly higher than a high level Zombie with similar links (If you find a good weapon to animate that is)

Another issue I noticed when leveling with Animate Weapon/Guardian is when you clear the content too quickly without grinding for levels - you end up being unable to animate half the gear the drops due to item level restrictions on the gems.

I am looking forward to any balance changes to these skills - but for now they simply do not match the utility of Zombies+Specters for damage/tanking - at least for a pure minion spec.

If they are intended to be used as supplementary damage for a melee class though, do they get some kind of hidden scaling based on gear...?

I really really want to like this gem, but its just meh

The 30 seconds really irks me.. but so does the fact that if they get sneezed on they die